I feel your pain, guys. ‘Serenity’ just about earned its expenses back, though it’s doing good on cable.

Smart people, even ubermenschen, sometimes miss the obvious.

If you despise the masses, how are you going to persuade the masses to buy tickets at upwards of ten bucks each? For a movie praising the elite, the few, the solitary? When your audience is made up of rugged individualists sitting alone in a half-empty theater? And you expect to make a profit? Do the math.

I’m surprised you never read Moby Dick.It ain’t a sea story.
We had a 10th grade English teacher who was great,Miss Vogel.She had us read and analyze some very good literature,including Moby Dick and Macbeth.We also got assigned to little groups and had to read and act out scenes from novels.
I got to be in the group doing Pride and Prejudice(BARF).
She also taught etymology-try finding that in 10th grade public high schools today!!
Once you’ve read Moby Dick,try Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.Make sure you have a ditionary close by(I needed one)and hopefully you know some Spanish-I speak Spanish and still needed to look things up.
My wife grew up speaking Spanish and couldn’t exactly translate some passages because the usage was Mexican.She spoke more or less Puerto Rican/Castilian Spanish.
Actually all of McCarthy’s work is worthwhile-I’ve read them all(10 novels) and there is a connecting theme.You have to figure it out.
He doesn’t come from a religious point of view.
Actually the exchange I had with Kiersten on “Grace”sort of hints at it,especially what she wrote.
Ayn Rand never interested me.
Denis Johnson writes some good stuff.

I just can’t get into the milieu of Austen.
Melville and McCarthy share a similar view of a pathological universe.
I’m not talking about crap like Mad Max,although McCarthy’s “The Road”is slightly akin,but not really.Only occasionally on the surface.
No one can approach the bleakness of life and the transitory nature of safety,comfort,and contentment like McCarthy.
I had a friend on my job named Jimmy who used to ask,only half kidding”What’s it all about?”
I used say it’s about what we’re doing this day,you can’t really expect anything.
It’s such a nice day out,yet people are miserable all over the place.There’s no rhyme or reason to anything,but you can’t just let go because you’ll wind up in Kennedy Plaza guzzling a jug out of a paper bag.
However,try to enjoy the nice dry suuny climes today.

I’m just remembering when I read my first “grown up”novel.I bought the Modern Library edition of “Studs Lonigan”the trilogy by James Farrell and whizzed through it.
I was 13 and used some of my Bar Mitzvah money to buy some books.
You like Lovecraft?
Try Clark Ashton Smith,a contemporary of his-he was a much better writer on the whole and you can access his stuff free on a site called The Eldritch Dark.
His writing ranges all over the place from antediluvian worlds to the far,far future,to interplanetary settings to medieval Europe.
Personally I really liked Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House”which was unrelated to the Cthulu Mythos or any supernatural manifestinations-it was entirely believable,and hence scarier.